"In the past, my boss and I had been talking about LED technology and all the benefits we would get by using it in the theatre," began Powell. "So when the University established a pool of money that was to be used for sustainability, we jumped at the opportunity to put together a proposal, and contacted our longtime friends at Vincent Lighting Systems to get the project going."
"Vincent Lighting is very proud to have been involved with NKU for a number of years," added Hayward. "We first became involved with this particular project over the summer when we received a phone call from Terry detailing the initiative that was taking place at the University. We started right away to develop a list of potential LED products that could meet all his lighting needs."
Located in the suburb of Highland Heights, seven miles southeast of Cincinnati, NKU has more than 15,000 students, and produces four main stage productions inside the Corbett Theatre where the lighting fixture renovation would take place.
Hayward continued: "With the Corbett Theatre in particular, NKU really wanted to focus on the lighting fixtures and getting them up-to-date with the latest technologies. But the necessity was also that the fixtures chosen had to be completely useful with the new LED fixtures being an equal replacement for the incandescent fixtures currently hanging in the rig. They didn't want to simply buy 'Green' technologies; they wanted to make sure that the fixtures chosen would perform how they expected."
In setting up the LED shoot-out, Hayward brought Powell four possible LED Wash fixtures to choose from, including the PL3 Wash luminaire from Philips Selecon.
"During the selection process, I researched several fixtures online and we did a demo with few different LED lights," said Powell. "When I first saw the PL3 Wash, the thing that I liked the most was that it looked and felt like a traditional Fresnel. With some of the other fixtures we looked at, you changed the beam spread by essentially putting diffusion media in the fixture itself, but with the PL3 Wash the zoom is built into the light so that was a big plus for us. But what really sold me on the light was how much brighter it was than its competition and that was what we really needed."
The Philips Selecon PL3 has a zoom range from 15 to 55 degrees and outputs over 6000 lumens.
"We first used the new lights on our production of Our Town and the show looked great," said Powell. "The multitude of colour choices was outstanding, and while we knew the LED technology would give us more colour options, once I was able to see all of them together, it was quite surprising."
(Jim Evans)
